Chapter 2
TWO
A shot of nerves zapped my heart, and still, Mr. Wilder watched me with the sort of ghost-like smirk that made me wonder if he could see the reflection of Brooke’s message in my glasses.
His own glasses would have to be modern tech marvels for him to see that much detail from this distance.
The simple tortoise-shell frames and a few faint scratches on the lenses made the likelihood minimal.
Still…it felt like something was faintly amusing to him.
Couldn’t he look around or check his texts in the name of human decency? This laser-like gaze made me feel on edge—and I didn’t scare easily.
“Busy woman,” he said.
“Comes with the territory.” I went to dismiss yet another new message. An article was attached: The Productivity Myth: What Taptrack Promises vs. What It Delivers by Grant Wilder.
My stomach sank. I remembered Taptrack. They were set to be the next big thing in workplace productivity. I’d looked into the software myself.
Then, suddenly, they’d gone under, though I’d never known why.
Was Brooke implying it had been Mr. Wilder’s doing?
My stomach clenched. What might he do with Matchify?
I forced myself to breathe. Taptrack had been employee surveillance dressed up as productivity. They weren’t synonymous with Matchify by any means.
I clicked out of the message and turned back to Mr. Wilder. “Sorry about that.”
“No need. I was in good company.” He glanced to his left at Cam Carter. “Is this your personal match?”
I offered a polite laugh while mentally adding a task to my calendar: strangle Brooke. “More like an office mascot.”
A laugh flashed through Mr. Wilder’s eyes. “Ah, yes.” He put a friendly hand on Cam’s two-dimensional shoulder, which contrasted sharply with his own well-formed and very four-dimensional one. “Hollywood actors. Known for their integrity and stable love lives.”
I ignored the bite of annoyance at his comment.
The legitimacy of the critique only made it more irritating.
“Well, we figure our users—who are, on average, twenty-nine years old—might relate better to Cam Carter than to a 95-year-old couple celebrating their silver anniversary. But we’re always open to improvement.
Perhaps you’d like to submit yourself for the job? ”
Mr. Wilder’s mouth stretched into a wide grin, full of straight teeth. Not Cam Carter, Hollywood-style veneers. These had a little character to them, giving an impression of realness and relatability. It made him all the more attractive.
Jenna’s rosy cheeks made sense if he’d targeted her with that smile.
Maybe Taptrack had been fooled by it too.
Not me. I needed to maintain my professionalism and let Matchify’s stats speak for themselves.
“Thanks for the offer,” Mr. Wilder said, “but I happen to like my job. Mind if I sit?”
“Of course,” I said calmly, a flush creeping up my neck. I should have offered him a seat already. I was off my game.
Mr. Wilder sat in the padded chair across from my desk, reclining as much as it would allow and crossing his ankle over the top of his other leg. I half-expected him to kick off his loafers, reach for a soda, and pop it open.
Instead, he opened his notepad and flipped over a few pages covered with graphite-colored scribbles.
I clasped my hands on the desk and waited, but my eyes flicked to my computer screen. There were a couple of new messages—this time in the Founder chat. The first was from my friend Jackie, Matchify’s lead developer.
Jackie: I hear we’ve got an unfriendly in the house?
Brooke: Confirm.
Katie: Dox him, Jack!
Katie was our User Experience expert, and she knew as well as anyone that Jackie would never even consider using her skills for such a malicious purpose.
Nick: Let me know if you need a timely interruption, Vivian
Nick was Matchify’s Head of Strategy, but unofficially, he spoke for all men in our Founder meetings. He wasn’t just the valuable but lone man in the Founding Five, though—he was the only one of us who was married.
I’d love to say Matchify was responsible for that success, but it had happened before the product’s development.
“You okay if we get right to it?”
I pulled my gaze from the screen in a hurry. “Of course, Mr. Wilder.”
“Grant,” he replied without looking up from his notes. “So, what sparked the idea for Matchify?”
Easy one. I’d only answered this question a million times. Standard interview fare.
I relaxed a bit. “I was in college studying data science, and I became interested in how people made decisions in dating—and all the ways compatibility gets ignored in that process. Most people cluster in predictable compatibility ranges—like a Bell curve. I wanted to build something that built on that to facilitate what’s often a difficult, messy experience. ”
It was what you might call a three-quarters truth. The fact that my own poor dating decisions had been the primary factor in starting Matchify was strictly need-to-know. This interview was about the Matchify vision, not my personal dating history.
The sound of scribbles filled the room for a few seconds. “What about the ones who don’t fit in your predictable ranges?”
I shrugged. “They’re outliers. Every curve has them.”
He gave a little nod I didn’t know how to interpret. “Was Matchify built more for the public, then, or”—his eyes flicked up to mine—“did you build it for yourself too?”
My heart somersaulted, but I recovered quickly. “I built it because the data were compelling. The inefficiency of dating systems was begging for a solution.” I frowned at the flicker of amusement that crossed over his expression. “What?”
“You used data in the plural.”
“Data are plural.”
His eyes held mine for a second like he was considering whether to argue the point. “Do you claim to have found the solution for heartbreak, then? It’s a bold assertion.”
I was tempted to double down at the obvious challenge in his expression, but that would have been a bad move—and way too easy for him to debunk. “I didn’t say Matchify was the solution but that the inefficiency was begging for one. Matchify is a leap toward it.”
His mouth quirked at the edge, and so did his brow. “One small step for man?”
It was like he wanted me to dig myself into a hole so he could bury me in it.
I wasn’t about to equate Matchify with putting a man on the moon, but in all honesty, how had Neil Armstrong’s step changed our everyday?
Matchify, on the other hand, was saving people heartache and pain, putting them on the path to happiness.
I’d take that leap over Armstrong’s any day.
“How do you measure success as an app?” he asked.
I smiled and turned to the graphic on my computer screen with all our most impressive stats.
“There are a number of metrics we go by, but a couple stand out. Users whose relationships begin via Matchify are 37% more likely than the industry standard to be together after six months. Around a fifth of Matchify users who complete three dating rounds end up in committed relationships, and 9% of those result in marriage.”
I watched his hand scribble on his notepad. I readjusted my glasses, but he had to have the worst handwriting in the known universe because I couldn’t make out a single thing.
Maybe he wasn’t actually writing anything—just trying to make me nervous.
“Isn’t it in your best interest for people not to get married, though?” His eyes flicked up, looking at me over rims I now noticed were the slightest bit crooked. “Then they’d continue using your app, right?”
I barely stifled a scoff. This man did not pull his punches.
“That might be true if you only look at things on a surface level,” I replied, keeping a soft smile to prevent the dig from seeming too aggressive.
“But we’re confident that providing users with the best possible experience will benefit both them and us most in the long run.
Happy results for customers mean more people willing to give us a shot. ”
Brooke would’ve been so proud of the balance of business and emotional appeal in my answer. She was always reminding me that each data point represented a person.
Despite my 10/10 answer, Grant didn’t write anything down.
“You mentioned that 9% of the”—he glances down at his chicken scratch—“20% of users end up married, but even that 20% is a subset, right? How many users do you have?”
So much for his scribbles being meaningless. He was definitely taking notes.
“Just shy of 400,000,” I replied.
“And how many of those complete three—did you call them ‘match cycles’?”
I was starting to really dislike Grant Wilder and his questions—and that slightly cocky expression that said he knew exactly what he was doing with them. I didn’t actually have the answer to this one ready at hand. That wasn’t something that happened often.
Apparently, my hesitation gave away my ignorance.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s generously assume that 60% of users complete three match cycles. That means, what?” He paused, his eyes fixed on me as he did the math. “Just over 1% of users find the person they marry through Matchify?”
What was he, a human calculator? Matilda’s nemesis?
I forced out a breathy laugh, determined to get through this interview with my composure intact.
“Impressive math. While we don’t yet have the customer reach of say, Tinder, we make up for it with the quality of our services and our results.
Those results may not impress you, Mr. Wilder, but compared to the industry marriage average, which is well under 1% with even the most generous of estimates, we stand out.
No question about it. We’re not facilitating hookups and swipes; we’re building relationships that last. And we’re only getting better. ”
I’d never seen a smile so full of good-natured skepticism. “It’s Grant. You seem to really believe in your company.”
And you seem not to. “I do.”
The next fifteen minutes were a blur of hard-hitting questions Brooke’s pretty infographic never quite had the answers to and then a disconcerting dance of Mr. Wilder’s piercing gaze, his flickering amusement, and his constant scribbles.
His pencil finally stilled. “You’re a busy woman, Miss West, so I won’t take more of your time.” He flipped the cover of his notebook over so that it hid the pages.
I blinked. It was over?
That had to be one of the shortest interviews I’d ever done, though what it lacked in length it had made up for in intensity.
My stomach squirmed. I didn’t feel like I’d done Matchify justice—or that Grant had given me the chance to. Sure, I’d gotten through the interview without any severe mishaps or PR disasters, but only by the skin of my teeth.
I would weep no tears watching Grant Wilder leave Matchify, but I felt unsettled, all the same.
He grasped his notebook and slipped the pencil behind his ear, looking like a high school senior who shows up to class prepared for nothing beyond maintaining his too-cool-for-school ego. “Does the same time tomorrow work? I’d love to get a tour of the office.”
I blinked. “I’m sorry, what?”
His eyes narrowed slightly. “Do you not do office tours?”
“We do,” I said, utterly and totally confused. “I just…”
“It’s a three-day interview,” he responded. “You knew that, right?”
“Of course.” I smiled widely, overcompensating for the sense of dread sliding into the pit of my stomach like tar. “Same time tomorrow works great.”
“Perfect.” He turned and stopped in front of the cardboard cutout, then made a fist with his free hand and bumped Cam’s shoulder in a hey, buckaroo kind of way. “See you tomorrow, Cam.”